Copyright fail: Warner Bros. reports own site as illegal

In its attempts to crack down on online privacy, film studio Warner Brothers has mistakenly asked Google to remove its own website from search results, saying it violates copyright laws.

The news was first reported by TorrentFreak, which discovered a new batch of takedown requests from Warner, which happens to target completely legitimate sites, like Amazon, and even the official Warner Bros site itself.

The takedown requests surrounded movies like The Dark Knight, The Matrix and The Lucky One.

In each of these instances, Warner Bros requested that its own official pages be removed from search results. Aside from that, the requests also targeted things like Sky Cinema and IMDb.
The request was submitted on behalf of Warner Brothers by Vobile, a company that files hundreds of thousands of takedown requests every month.

“Warner is inadvertently trying to make it harder for the public to find links to legitimate content, which runs counter to its intentions,” said Ernesto van der Sar, from Torrent Freak.

Google’s transparency report says Vobile has submitted more than 13 million links for removal.
It also reveals other potential mistakes – such as film studio Lionsgate reporting a copy of London Has Fallen found on the Microsoft download store.

After reviewing the Warner Brothers report, Google decided not to remove links to Amazon, IMDB and Sky Cinema from its results.